Week 4 - Mary

I just finished my fourth week of the summer immersion program at Weill Cornell, and the balance has shifted more toward research. Most of my time went toward refining my project and carefully reviewing the literature to identify the specific research gaps. The further I get into it, the more I am struck by how much remains unknown in the ADPKD world, particularly around what happens after a kidney transplant, which is what my project is trying to address.

A large part of the week was spent labeling imaging data, which turned out to be more engaging than I'd anticipated. Moving through the scans sequentially, you can clearly see the disease progress in real time. Additionally, labeling the imaging data also gave me a much better sense of the practical differences between MRI and CT. The MRI images are noticeably less sharp, but they still capture the same clinically relevant information while avoiding the radiation exposure that comes with CT. For a disease like ADPKD, where you're tracking changes over years or even decades, that distinction matters considerably, and it's a big part of why MRI has become the more practical long-term option for monitoring kidney volume.
 
On the technical side, I've also been adapting existing lab code to meet the specific aims of my research project. Specifically, the goal is to track kidney volume over time and correlate it with patient biomarkers, particularly creatinine, a standard measure of kidney filtration. As I described in an earlier post, one of the central mysteries my project is working around is why native kidney volume decreases after transplantation, and what distinguishes the patients who don't show that same reduction. Being able to map longitudinal changes in volume against creatinine is a step toward answering that and toward understanding what the transplant is actually doing to the native kidneys beyond simply relieving the filtration burden, and this is what I am trying to restructure the code to allow for.